


she thinks that happiness is a mat that sits on her doorway

by r1ker



Category: Midnight Special (2016)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-05-19
Packaged: 2018-06-09 08:34:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6898801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/r1ker/pseuds/r1ker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>matchbox twenty - 3am</p></blockquote>





	she thinks that happiness is a mat that sits on her doorway

_Roy:_

_Mom's sick. She'd come by one day after I got off of work to tell me that she hadn't been feeling right the last few days. I didn't think for a second she'd ever catch anything heavier than a cold, on account of she's never been this downbeat before. Walking around my place in a kind of stupor, having to catch herself on doorframes and countertops to keep from falling over._

_Dad tells me she's getting old. You know as well as I do she wasn't much of a spring chicken when I was born. I got to hand it to her; I'd have given up on having kids after the last four miscarriages. But that's mom, she's not giving up even when she's most certainly out of turns._

_So she goes to the doctor, asks me to pick up prescriptions for medications I couldn't pronounce on even my most articulate days. They say it's leukemia at this last one, he was a real character and I wish you'd have met him, and the pills, potions and lotions are only working to control it, stop her pain where it comes, not stop it. But, somehow, she gets right on by._

_But we can only keep pumping her full of drugs for the time being. Only so much a human body can take, right? I just hope she can hold on a little while longer. We're coming along day after day medically, I guess. All sorts of things people with brains that could fill large rooms are making to extend the human lifespan five months here, ten years there. They'll do the same for mom._

_That's all for now. I hope you're holding on wherever they've got you for the time being. Know that I love you, love you with everything in me, and get back to me when and if you can._

_Lucas_

_Roy:_

_Mom seems to be holding on, as best as someone can in her condition. She's staying close to me now and I've taken shorter, occasional shifts on the beat. At first glance we're bosom buddies. I get a real firsthand look at just how boring public access TV is at 4:00 on a Wednesday morning but the game shows, the advertisements for wonder bras and salad keepers are made doable with her next to me._

_The leukemia is spreading sure and steady, as it so happens. It started getting bad in the last few days when she'd come back from chemo, run down like they'd had her take a few laps in the center, and she'd go to bed earlier. And earlier. And now it's like she can't seem to get enough of sleeping on that old foldout bed in the couch in my den. I always wake her up, have her take as much of dinner as she can and a bath if she's able to stand up long enough to let me lead her into the bathroom._

_For the most part I let her be. She tells me time and time again, as I lie on her shoulder as if she were my sick daughter, of all the times I was in her position as a little boy. How I never seemed to go to sleep unless I was resting in her arms, head on her shoulder, maybe an ear to her heart. Most nights I talk her right back to sleep, chatting about nothing sometimes, but many of those pillow talks are about what will become of her husband, her son after she's long since succumbed._

_I always tell her that's not going to happen. No way in hell, as we're getting closer and closer to finding a way to stop it, stop it from taking over her life and her body. But in these last few days she knows more than all those doctors at Baptist combined._

_Last night she asked Dad over – he's been back at the house holding the fort down, going out in the early morning to take care of business around the house, letting out the dogs and keeping up with her garden since she threatened to kill him if he didn't – and he seemed to know it too. With him came the old file I hadn't seen in years, not since I was in the hospital for that appendectomy I had when I was eight (you know that one. Y'all brought me ice cream cake when you heard)._

_Last will, testament, final wishes. Estate._

_In it all she's left the affairs she had in the stock market, in what was left of that dairy farm her father left her in Sugarland, all she could ever hope to have in being a former young lady of Killeen, to "the sole heir to the worth of the family, born 1977 in Fort Worth, TX and in employment of the Texas Department of Corrections."_

_God, that God you and all those folks are loving right now wherever you are, reduced me from a loving son to a happenstance human born in a year on a date in a place working for a department. And I don't know if I'll ever understand that, in all I'm able to know in being just a simple man such as myself. But I'll try my hardest. Might even ask mom, before she goes._

_I love you with everything in me. Write you soon, cross my heart._

_Lucas_

_Roy:_

_I'm back again and like before I haven't got the best of news. Or rather, the news we would have ever hoped for. At least I wouldn't have. Never for a second would I have imagined myself sitting in the county coroner's office with a pad and pen I had to ask for, so I could write this. ~~Like you'll read it~~. _

_Mom died this morning. Went in her sleep. I came in to get her up – she'd told me the night before to have her up before sunrise, as if this little woman was going to go over to Dad's with me and get the house all set up for the day – and she was no more. I touched her hand and thought for a fleeting fucking moment I'd left a window open, let a draft from the night sneak in._

_She'd always been so petite, as tiny as a doll in her dresses and skirts always pleated, but under all those bedclothes, those blankets she had to have to stop herself from shivering so hard her teeth would clack, she was a marionette. I was terrified to get any closer to her when I knew for certain she'd died. I called dad, he called the coroner and the ambulance, and they came and got her._

_A lot of sons say they'll never see their fathers cry. No way a man that's now a father would ever have a reason to shed a tear outside of seeing their children born. I watched this man, who'd come back from Berlin with a hole in his vest and a medal around his neck, who married the only one he'd love with all of what was left of his heart (sound familiar?), who watched four of his children die to have only one live, chase after an ambulance bearing his dead wife._

_He'd held onto me ever since. Even now he's not too far away from me, propped up on one of the benches with our coats over him, his shoes keeping his head from aching against the armrest. I'll keep him with me until I know for certain he can be on his own with only me as a standby._

_We start making arrangements for her tomorrow. She'd kept it short and sweet in her will. No big parades, no open casket. A cremation and scattering out at the place where the Dallas Cowboys play. I don't know too well if I can get her that last part; not only do they have a game this weekend but also I don't know the staff all that well. But I do have an inkling where I'll take her._

_I'm putting her where I found my first semblance of happiness. No, not at Dairy Queen where we found out they gave out ice cream for free if it didn't sell by the end of the night. I'm taking her along Dickson Drive, where you lived the first eighteen years of your life. Where I found you so many nights when you were still mine, found you waiting for me, surprised I was even there._

_I'll put her by that tree in your backyard. Where your tire swing hung when you were too young to know any better. Where you took your Slugger to the trunk to show off all those skills you got in those six weeks of tee ball camp. The one I pushed you up against when you were seventeen, claimed your mouth all for myself in that one instance when you knew you couldn't take another second denying yourself me._

_Because that's where I knew joy, hell, even peace. She shouldn't be dumped out in a river with so many other melted relatives who perhaps possess their own demons. That's not what a woman like her ought to lie by as she floats away from this world. She should know love. And that's what you gave me. Even though she didn't know it at the time._

_Anyway, rambling on. Too tired to see much of anything that's not a blur. Do I even need to say it? Love you muchly. Talk to you very soon._

_Lucas_

_Roy:_

_I can't do it. I never thought I'd be sitting next to my mother's ashes. She rests in a copper urn – a nice one, really, Dad picked it out – and I am so lost as to what to do. I know what I ought to do. I've told you time and time again what my plans are for her new world in the afterlife, but I don't know if I have the strength._

_The urn itself isn't all that heavy. After all she'd wasted away something terrible in those last few days, half of herself really, and it's like they didn't have much work for themselves when it came time to do the deed. But when I pick it up, let it rest between both of my hands, it feels like I've got the weight of the world bearing down on me._

_I can feel myself holding not just a woman but all she held for herself, her husband and son. An early life spent under the watchful eye of a family of Irish immigrants, in the wonderland of the University of Texas when she'd more than proven herself worthy of a rare college education, next to a young man named Austin at the altar of a Methodist church not too far where she'd been baptized in a river, not far away from her newborn baby born living unlike four others before him._

_And now she rests in the hands of that very same son. I am holding the ashes of a woman who had more than three decades ahead of her in this world; to watch her son marry the one he loved from the second he'd met him in elementary school. I had this big old dream when I was younger. I remember being seventeen years old and looking at books of states up north having couples petitioning for their marriages to be heard by their states only to have them fail._

_I'd had big plans then. I knew down to the very details how and when I was going to marry you. You were a young lady when I told the tall tale to her. She was ecstatic I'd found someone and even she went along with the game, showed me a dress at Penney's she had set aside for when I finally mustered up the courage to pop the question._

_I had a ring. She had the garb of the mother of the groom, pillbox hat and new lipstick from the makeup counter. And now she's got an urn picked out. And in this I can find no one else to blame but myself. I blame my lack of acting. I could have found some way to keep you here with me, keep you bound to me by the promise of a union. She would have gotten her wish of having a son rejuvenated through the lovely act of marriage she herself knew as one of the best things to happen to her._

_But now she has the earth coming to her. At this pace maybe I will, too. I can't see past the blinders made up of her, that crooked smile she always swore to get fixed just as soon as we had the money. You are one as well, just as tall and demanding as your presence has been. Maybe I'll find a way past them, maybe I'll allow them to fold around me until there is nothing left but to be astounded by their capacity to encompass._

_Either way, after this is all said and done and the urn is empty, I love you. I might have given up on marrying you, making you mine under the eyes of the law I swore to protect two years ago, but I never gave up on how much I loved you._

_Lucas_

**Author's Note:**

> matchbox twenty - 3am


End file.
